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On his birthday, Narendra Modi reaches out to OBCs

 

Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi‘s 64th birthday on Tuesday coinciding with Vishwakarma Jayanti turned out to be a major political event, with the BJP‘s prime ministerial candidate making an outreach to workers in both the organized and unorganized sectors who worship Vishwakarma, the Hindu deity of machines and tools.
Modi was busy with functions throughout the day, from seeking his mother Hiraben’s blessings at her Gandhinagar home in the morning where she gifted him a copy of the Bhagvad Gita, to meeting his political rival Keshubhai Patel, president of Gujarat Parivartan Party.
Modi, who received greetings from many including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and BJP veteran L K Advani whom he just overpowered in the leadership tussle, reached out to workers by greeting them on Viswakarma Jayanti. He used the motto of “Shrameva Jayate (labour alone prevails) to emphasize the dignity of labour.
Being the only Hindu festival whose date is fixed by the Roman calendar and which, therefore, does not change, the link between Vishwakarma Jayanti and Modi’s birthday was not a coincidence. However, his comments on Tuesday stood out because they came against the backdrop of feeling of some in Sangh Parivar that the party can hope to gain electorally by cashing in on Modi’s credential as the strongest OBC contender ever for the country’s top job.

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New Worlds : How to build a ‘perfect’ language

IBM correcting Selectric IIi typewriter predominantly used by Eppie Lederer as Ann Landers in her home office, 1950. (Photo by Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)
It’s well known that JRR Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings cycle to create people to speak the languages he had invented. But, in the television age, artificially created or invented languages – we call them “conlangs” – have been gaining increasing attention with the popularity of television series such as Star Trek and Game of Thrones, and films such as Avatar.
Fantasy and science fiction are the ideal vehicles for conlangs. Marc Okrand, an American linguist whose core research area is Native American languages, invented Klingon for Star Trek, while Paul Frommer of the University of Southern California created the Na’vi language for Avatar.
The fantasy series Game of Thrones involved several languages, including Dothraki and Valyrian, which were created by David J Peterson, a “conlanger” who has invented languages for several other shows. Most recently, fantasy thriller The City and The City featured the language Illitan, created by Alison Long of Keele University in the UK.
I teach how to construct languages and one question my students usually ask is: “How do I make a perfect language?” I need to warn that it’s impossible to make a language “perfect” – or even “complete”. Rather, an invented language is more likely to be appropriate for the context – convincing and developed just enough to work in the desired environment. But here are a few things to bear in mind.

 

With the current Big Data and Map reduce there are several online projects that constantly try to play with words Don’t forget the Natural Language processing (NLP) that is intended for even robots or AI to understand Language.

 

A perfect language can actually be a simple software filter that would scan large quantities of all the linguistic texts and identify the recurring patterns in different languages and use this with a new symbolism that can be both read by both human and machine would actually make the whole thing more Perfect and worth while. And don’t forget the amount of jobs and the literature that might get generated albeit be it only digital unless fully accepted by the larger sections of people after all it is something both human and machine can work with together. Instead of being forced onto or Influenced and oppressed upon? Maybe the Next Einstein could use this to influence the next generation for much larger good, peace and prosperity both locally and globally. This could provide a different angle or perspective into the thought process of creating a language even for machine only!

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Transhumanism, Tragic Humanism, and The View From Nowhere

A number of scholars of post-humanity (such as Hayles and Wolfe) have argued that transhumanism is an unduly optimistic extension of humanism. I can’t agree – not only is it not optimistic, it is not a humanism. Transhumanism is filled with the anxiety of extinction. It also is enthused enough about non-human flourishing that it marks a departure from humanism (besides: is anything more optimistic than humanism in its enlightenment mode?). Transhumanism’s posthumanist stance is the continuation of enlightenment technoscience in so far as it centralizes human technology, even if it projects the technoscientific breakdown of humanity. However, insofar as its ideas and projected technologies propose an almost panpsychic collapse of mind and matter, it pushes us beyond reductive materialist, secular and humanist arrangements, and points to some interesting new openings.

One way to go about thinking through all this is to consider, as Bialecki and Lowrie have suggested, the figure of anthropos. The human is, as Foucault pointed out, an image built through a series of disciplines (biology, economics, linguistics) that came together in the space of non-transcendental knowledge to capture human activity (life, labor, language). The figure under which that image has been organized is anthropos, combining modern science and humanism in an often fraught relationship.

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New Worlds : 23 Places We’ve Found Water in Our Solar System

Oceans, Ices, Vapors: Turns out the Solar System isn’t so parched. We survey the moons and planets where scientists are finding water in all its forms.

Underwater water worlds are no place for vegetarians Sorry folks stay at home no place for vegetarian astronauts because outside planet earth most habitable worlds are Underwater planets without Sunlight so… See ya… (fishetarianism because it is universal and cosmic)

Last week brought the news that Enceladus likely has a warm salty ocean, and that liquid water lurks beneath the surface of Ganymede. These findings are continuing to chip away at the once-held belief that the solar system was dry and barren, bereft of water.

THE HUNT FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE HAS TURNED TO OUR OWN COSMIC BACKYARD

It seems there are few places in the solar systems without some amount of water, whether liquid or solid. There’s even a small amount of water vapor on Venus, something like 20 parts-per-million. And every time a source of liquid water is found or suggested, it brings up the chances of life on that world because of the way water acts as a solvent – facilitating the metabolic processes at the most basic level of life. That’s why the hunt for extraterrestrial life (quite doubtfully of an intelligent sort, though we’ve found some quite remarkable octopuses on Earth) has turned from distant solar systems to our own cosmic backyard.

Here’s the breakdown of all the water we know about in the solar system, and what form it comes in.

Oceans
All But Confirmed:

Europa

Europa

  • Gravitational force : 1.315 m/s².
  • Escape velocity : 2.025 km/s .

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